This is sounding more and more like slavery. I just can't believe it's coming back and is going to be socially acceptable. How morally disgusting.

A lawsuit filed in Arizona claims a city ordinance forces local artists to use their talents to promote same-sex weddings and does not allow them to express freely their belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.

Koski and Duka, who want to honor God through their art and business, specialize in hand painting, hand lettering and calligraphy for events, like weddings.

Phoenix law "strips artists of their freedom to choose what to create and what to say in the marriage context," the complaint against the city says. If Koski and Duke were to turn down creating art to celebrate a same-sex marriage, the city could fine them up to $2,500 for each day they violate the law and make them spend six months in jail since their studio creates art for opposite-sex wedding ceremonies, according to the complaint.

The Federal and Local governments with their big socialist hearts who are more than happy to spend other people's money, thinks by raising the minimum wage they are marching us all into a new world of prosperity and love.

“I want to try it,” CEO Puzder told Business Insider. He’s looking at something “where you order on a kiosk, you pay with a credit or debit card, your order pops up, and you never see a person.”

Is he being heartless? No. Just responding to the government’s foolish plans to jack up the minimum wage and put restaurants, hotels, bars and other service industries out of business. “With government driving up the cost of labor, it’s driving down the number of jobs,” said Puzder. “You’re going to see automation not just in airports and grocery stores, but in restaurants.”

He’s right. That’s why whenever the minimum wage rises above the market-set prevailing wage, jobs are destroyed. Who would pay someone $15 an hour to do a job that’s worth less than that? No one.

"Today's decision ... will force the men and women that own New York City's restaurants to start complying with this unlawful and unprecedented sodium mandate before the court has the chance to rule on the merits of our appeal," the organization said in a statement.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

The movements of gold and equities during the start of an equities bear market are almost like a well timed dual partner high dive. I went back to the 2008/9 crash and saw the phenomena. Then I started wondering if this happened during other bear markets. I was impressed with what I saw. So, now I call it the "Johnny Funk". But, hey, maybe it's all a coincidence...

I put this together a few months ago. I was intrigued with the relationship between gold and the equities market:

Now, please keep in mind this is just my observance and it
may or may not be correct. I may be way
off mark!! Having said that, enter at
your own risk!

Let’s compare this to the other bear markets before 2008/9.

First stop: 1987

I thought I would look at the other stock crashes and see if
the same thing happened. So, we first
get in our WayBack Machine and look at the crash of ’87. However, the ETF GLD was not around
then. Another fund was, though, called
USERX which is a gold and precious metals mutual fund.

S&P500 is the bottom blue. USERX is the top red
line. What do you notice?

1

1) Gold rises first doing so at a rapid pace.

2) Rising stock market peaks

3) Gold falters and takes a nose dive. Technically, it breaks down before the stock
market drops.

4) Gold continues to breakdown and reaches its low
before the stock market reaches its low.

5) Then the stock market makes its low.In this case, gold tries to keep going up,
but there’s too much in the way. Gold retreats from the pop up from the drop
and continues its bear market.

Next stop: 2001

This chart is complex, coverinig a much longer period
of time – it took 2 years for the SPX to bottom out. In fact, it goes on for so long you could
probably break it down even further and see the same pattern along the
way. There was no GLD ETF in the year
2000 so I had to break it up and use a different gold chart:

The $GOLD chart is on top and the S&P500 is on the
bottom.

1) Gold rises first, doing so at a rapid pace.(I should note that gold was in a bear market
through this time.It was also higher a
few weeks earlier…but we look at the closest rise in gold to the market top).

2) Rising stock market peaks

3)Gold falters and takes a nose dive.Technically, it breaks down before the stock
market drops.

4) Gold continues to breakdown and reaches its low
before the stock market reaches its low.

5)Then the stock market makes its low.Unlike 1987, gold recovers nicely and starts
on one of the most amazing bullmarkets ever.

Hidden microphones that are part of a clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the Bay Area has been exposed.

Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing. It happens all the time, and the FBI doesn’t even need a warrant to do it.

Federal agents are planting microphones to secretly record conversations.

Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent said, “They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there’s microphones that are planted in places that people don’t think about, because that’s the intent!”

Thursday, May 12, 2016

So what happens when the tech market turns, and when the layoffs spread from smaller companies, and from Motorola and Yahoo and the like to the Big Five, and they dump some of the vast leased space they’re now warehousing for future use on the sublet market?

Everyone here who’s been through this before knows what will happen. Sublease space will skyrocket. It will turn the market upside down. Demand will evaporate overnight. The market will become illiquid. Deal volume will crater. Lease rates will follow. This is always how it happens after such a boom.

“All it takes is a couple of big tech companies folding and the floodgates open, causing the sublease market to blow up, rents to drop, and new construction to grind to a halt,” according to Savills Studley new report on San Francisco. Read… “Market is on Edge”: US Commercial Real Estate Bubble Pops, San Francisco Braces for Brutal Dive

Monday, May 9, 2016

A few days ago when gold had made that tremendous pop up, I
mentioned to my friends some things regarding the Japanese Nikkei stock market, Yen and
gold. To be perfectly honest I have no
idea why the hell there is this relationship.
But for some reason, there is this crazy relationship. So, today I thought I would show some visuals
so you can see it, too.

Here is the Yahoo chart for the Nikkei and the Yen. The lower line is the YEN (FXY ETF). As the
Nikkei rises, the Yen goes down. It’s an
inverse relationship.

Now, we’ll superimpose the Yen to GLD. And
you’ll see the two track eachother.
Why does it do this? I HAVE NO
IDEA!!!

Will this keep up? To be honest, the Japanese economy is on
life support. And as time progresses,
the Japanese situation just gets worse and worse. Will this tracking continue?

Now finally, we have to ask ourselves, if the Japanese
economy is in such bad shape, what does
the future hold for the Nikkei??

Fortunately, for us, we have a long a long term chart for
the Japanese stock market (Nikkei). As you can see, the overarching trend shows
the Japanese stock market to TANK. From its (recent) peak of about 21,000 all the way
down to 10,000. That’s a 50% loss.

What this is telling
us is that gold will rise with the value of the Yen. And the rise in gold will be absolutely
stunning.

Finally, one final chart of the Japanese Yen and the UUP
(exchange traded dollar ETF). As you can
see, the Yen and the USD have an inverse relationship. As the Yen strengthens, the dollar weakens,
thus driving up the price of gold.

And this is why I was
able to tell my friends the good news before the markets even opened.

The U.S. dollar index is a basket of currencies weighted by
trade between the U.S and other countries. As such, its composition is roughly
half weighted to the euro. Normally, that gives charts of the dollar index and
the euro a mostly inverse relationship. The euro, however, has not made a
technical breakout move from its own pattern. It is the Japanese yen, with its
13.6% weight, that is now driving the dollar index.

….

Trends in currencies, once they get started, tend to persist,
sometimes for years. The yen last peaked in 2011, so last year’s bottoming followed
a four-year bear market. Before that, it rallied from 2007 to 2011, also four
years.

I do not want to
suggest that there is another three or more years to go in the current rally,
but it does seem that resistance for the yen ETF at the $97.00-$97.50 area is a
reasonable upside target. The ETF traded at $90.87 Monday afternoon.

The most important takeaway is that because all of these
currencies – both major and emerging – are in rising trends, it is the U.S. dollar that is weak. Only the yen now exhibits
true strength on its own. Domestic interest-rate policy will be of keen
interest to everyone as it directly influences the flow of capital and hence
the demand for dollars.

The takeaway from the article is
that the JPY will indeed be the catalyst for driving the USD down in value for
the next several years (and gold upwards).

But like I mentioned earlier to my colleagues there is no telling how long this will last.

I am of the opinion that the Yen will
continue to rise….until it doesn’t.

If
the Yen can maintain its upward projection, it can do this for another three years….it
is an axiomatic fact that markets can move higher far longer than you could
possibly expect them to – the same with currencies... this will take us
to….2019. And this…is the beginning of
the end…

Thursday, May 5, 2016

According to AmericasPower.org, energy bills already consume, on average, a whopping one-fifth of low-income Americans’ income. Percentage-wise, lower-income and middle-income households spend more than twice the average of higher-income households on energy. And lower-income families in particular spend three times more proportionally on energy than households with higher incomes.

Consider California, home to billionaire and climate activist Tom Steyer, who has financed major pushes for green energy mandates. According to the Institute for Energy Research, household electricity bills in California run about 40 percent higher than the national average and are the ninth-most expensive in the nation, thanks to a law requiring green energy to comprise 33 percent of the state’s electricity supply by 2020. Mr. Steyer testified in favor of a 2015 measure that would have raised the target to 50 percent by 2030.

A Manhattan Institute analysis indicates that 1 million California households now live in energy poverty. California currently has the nation’s highest poverty rate, which is now 50 percent higher than Mississippi.

We are following in the European footsteps.

Europe’s experience should serve as a warning. It has been subject to green energy mandates for years, and the economic impact hasn’t been pretty.

During the past eight years, electricity in Europe has become 42 percent more expensive, according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union. Eight million French households are no longer able to pay their electricity bill, and some 350,000 German residences have had their power cut off, up 13 percent from 2011. German consumers’ electricity bills have doubled since 2000, when a renewable-energy levy was tacked onto every residential electricity bill to subsidize owners of turbines and solar panels. The World Health Organization estimates that 30 percent of European winter deaths may be attributable to living in insufficiently heated homes.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

If these figures merely reflected black consumer choice, they wouldn't necessarily matter; but the evidence suggests that specific public policies in these cities are to blame. Primary among them are restrictive planning regulations, common along the West Coast, that make it hard to expand the supply of housing. In a market with rising demand and static supply, prices go up.

As a rule, a household should spend no more than three times its annual income on a home. But in West Coast markets, housing-price levels far exceed that benchmark — a hardship that more severely affects blacks than whites because blacks start from further behind economically. Black median household income is only $35,481 a year, compared with $57,355 for whites. The wealth gap is even wider, with median black household wealth at only $7,133, compared with $111,146 for whites.

About Me

I have 35 years as a chemical engineer. I would not classify myself as an expert, but I would call myself very knowledgeable. I've done engineering and design in the food processing business, biotech, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, oil and gas, polymers, biodiesel, biomass to liquids, coal to liquids and gas to liquids. I'm also a worldwide published author having written in the past for Computer Shopper Magazine among other minor magazines for several years.
I have one patent in my name.